[BretLudwig]

((No word on whether he has a nurse named, say, er....oh never mind.
Bret))

Never mind ...

"From the leftwing Independent in Britain, we see the admission from the
World Health Organization that the Great and the Good have been, well,
lying to us about AIDS for a quarter of a century:

Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report
admits

A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of
Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts

By Jeremy Laurance

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health
Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual
pandemic has disappeared.

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy
promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin
de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be
no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside
Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading
the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by
the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations
everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was
confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting
drug users, and sex workers and their clients. €¦

In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which
provides 20 per cent of all funding for Aids, warned that Russia was on
the cusp of a catastrophe. An estimated 1 per cent of the population was
infected, mainly through injecting drug use, the same level of infection
as in South Africa in 1991 where the prevalence of the infection has since
risen to 25 per cent.

Dr De Cock said: "I think it is unlikely there will be extensive
heterosexual spread in Russia. But clearly there will be some spread."
€¦

Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund,
have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people
infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria,
spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather
than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.

Dr De Cock labelled these the "four malignant arguments" undermining
support for the global campaign against Aids, which still faced formidable
challenges, despite the receding threat of a generalised epidemic beyond
Africa.

Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who
rejected HIV as the cause of the disease, or who used the disease as a
weapon to stigmatise high risk groups, he said. €¦

Critics of the global Aids strategy complain that vast sums are being
spent educating people about the disease who are not at risk, when a far
bigger impact could be achieved by targeting high-risk groups and focusing
on interventions known to work, such as circumcision, which cuts the risk
of infection by 60 per cent, and reducing the number of sexual partners.

There were "elements of truth" in the criticism, Dr De Cock said. "You
will not do much about Aids in London by spending the funds in schools. You
need to go where transmission is occurring. It is true that countries have
not always been good at that."€¦

One of the danger areas for the Aids strategy was among men who had
sex with men. He said: " We face a bit of a crisis [in this area]. In the
industrialised world transmission of HIV among men who have sex with men
is not declining and in some places has increased. €¦

The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the
disease in sub-Saharan Africa €“ with infection rates exceeding 40 per
cent of adults in Swaziland, the worst-affected country €“ but nowhere
else.

"It is the question we are asked most often €“ why is the situation
so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors €“ more
commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a
young population and concurrent sexual partnerships."

"Sexual behaviour is obviously important but it doesn't seem to
explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total
number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in
the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual
partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point
of view, are more efficient at spreading infection." €¦.

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of
infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in
North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How
do you explain such differences?"

How do you explain such differences between North Dakota and Washington
DC? It's a conundrum, a quandary, a puzzlement. Dr. Cock and the rest of
the worlds' AIDS experts are stumped, apparently, and if they can't figure
it out, with all their lavish research funding, then nobody could ever
possibly puzzle it out. Some things we are just meant never to
understand.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/never-mind.html

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